Not All Their Work’s Pure Gold

“Gorilla at Large.” “Cry Baby Killer.” “He Knows You’re Alone.” “For Those Who Think Young.” Disreputable? Indubitably. But all of these movies are distinguished by one thing--they all feature an actor or actress who later won an Academy Award. “Mama Dracula.” “Old Dracula.” “Dracula’s Dog.” Sad to say, this trio of schlocky movies somehow all feature an actor or actress who in better days had won an Academy Award.

Such is life.

Just two years before shouting “Show me the money!” in “Jerry Maguire” and winning an Oscar as best supporting actor, Cuba Gooding Jr. had been stuck in an already-forgotten film called “Lightning Jack,” where he said nothing at all: He played Paul Hogan’s mute sidekick. Gooding’s victory provided the viewing audience with one of the chief pleasures of the Academy Awards--witnessing the triumph of an individual who has risen from the dregs of a career to the greatest acclaim Hollywood has to offer.

Cinematic changes in fortune are usually not as abrupt as Gooding’s. Migrating from B-moviedom to an Academy Award tends to be a gradual thing, and the early careers of many Oscar winners are treasure troves of trash.

In 1980, if you had happened to catch Tom Hanks’ peripheral role in “He Knows You’re Alone”--a slasher movie shot entirely on Staten Island--it would have been impossible to foresee that not only would this unprepossessing young man with 3 1/2 minutes of screen time have a major career, but that the future co-star of the cross-dressing sitcom “Bosom Buddies” would also become the first actor since Spencer Tracy to win consecutive best actor awards.

The academy’s acting annals are filled with shady pasts. Whatever thespian talents were in evidence in the aforementioned “Cry Baby Killer,” “Gorilla at Large” and “For Those Who Think Young,” they gave no indication that, respectively, Jack Nicholson (three wins, 11 nominations), Anne Bancroft (one win, five nominations) or Ellen Burstyn (one win, five nominations) would become part of Oscar history.

Such titles as “The Return of Dr. X” (Humphrey Bogart), “Girls on Probation” (Susan Hayward), “Torchy Plays With Dynamite” (Jane Wyman), “She Wanted a Millionaire” (Spencer Tracy), “The Butcher’s Wife” (Frances MacDormand) and “Rollercoaster” (Helen Hunt) are celluloid doppelgangers, fun-house mirror images to go alongside the Oscar-winning “The African Queen,” “I Want to Live!,” “Johnny Belinda,” “Captains Courageous,” “Fargo” and “As Good as It Gets.”

Use such metamorphoses as inspiration. If, in 1977, Susan Sarandon was mired in “Checkered Flag or Crash”--just a couple years after playing leading lady to Robert Redford and Jack Lemmon--and still went on to become a multi-nominated Oscar winner, then there’s hope for us all.

On the other hand. . . .

Anyone clutching the gold statuette on Oscar night inevitably feels all will be well from there on. With the validation of the most famous entertainment prize in the world, what’s there to worry about?

Plenty.

Some cautionary tales:

At the height of his career in the 1950s, Jose Ferrer was regarded as perhaps the genius in the world of the arts, a true Renaissance man who distinguished himself as an actor, director, writer in cinema and the theater. (Think of him as a bankable Orson Welles.) And to top it off, he was married to one of America’s 1950s sweethearts, Rosemary Clooney. The guy had it all. Yet, the man who was named best actor of 1950 for his role in “Cyrano de Bergerac” eventually ended up starring in “Dracula’s Dog.” (It took Ferrer 27 years to go from an Academy Award to the blood-thirsty mutt, though he had any number of other low spots along the way. A 16-year gap came between David Niven’s Oscar for “Separate Tables” and his role as the title character in “Old Dracula.” Louise Fletcher’s flight from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” to “Mama Dracula” was a mere five-year descent.)

Joan Crawford’s professional life consisted of a constant series of ups and downs, and she prided herself as much for being a survivor as for her acting abilities. Her 1945 Academy Award-winning comeback in “Mildred Pierce” was her sweetest rebound, arriving as it did after years of flops, when she had been considered washed up by almost everyone in the business. Ever cagey, Crawford even devised a psychosomatic bout of the flu to keep her away from Grauman’s Chinese on Academy Award night. That way, to pay her homage, Hollywood was forced to trek out to Brentwood and grovel at her sickbed. She basked in the glorification.

Oh, what a night. But, oh, what was yet to come. . . .

In her penultimate movie, the tawdry British thriller “Berserk!,” Crawford--her face frozen into one (dour) expression--speaks in a gruff monotone as the owner of a circus where grisly (for 1967) murders are occurring. (A reviewer for the New York Daily News was the soul of understatement in declaring that “the film hardly will add to her prestige as an actress.”) Atrocious as it is, “Berserk!” is “Sawdust and Tinsel” compared to Crawford’s swan song, “Trog” (1970), in which she’s a scientist who discovers a troglodyte. Although Trog’s a bit peevish--he kills some college boys and tears a dog apart for stealing his ball--Dr. Joan treats him like a charming rogue she can coax into respectability, as though he were Clark Gable and this was MGM 35 years earlier. Legend has it that she was blotto when she signed to do these movies. Indeed, producer Herman Cohen extracted a promise from Crawford that she wouldn’t begin drinking in the morning until after the cameras started rolling.

But Crawford knew no way of life other than being a star, and if third-rate British horror pictures were the only productions that would have her, so be it. “Berserk!” at least flattered her by asking audiences to accept that 37-year-old leading man Ty Hardin would fall hard for this harsh-looking woman in her mid-60s. She must also have enjoyed how the film echoed her own life--the villain of “Berserk!” turns out to be the envious, good-for-nothing daughter, an unmistakable Christina Crawford surrogate. As for her final film, Joan’s sober assessment was, “If I weren’t a Christian Scientist and I saw ‘Trog’ advertised on a marquee across the street, I think I’d contemplate suicide.”

Crawford’s sometime rival Bette Davis was following a similar path around this same time. The most acclaimed actress of the late ‘30s and early ‘40s, Davis had been such a perennial presence in Oscar races--the Meryl Streep of her era--that Bob Hope would joke, “Bette drops in at these affairs every year for a cup of coffee and another Oscar.” Certainly no one could have predicted a time when she’d be reduced to playing a middle-aged, would-be-comic bank robber straddling a motorcycle and wearing hippie garb in “Bunny O’Hare” (1971), co-starring another Oscar winner, Ernest Borgnine. By her own admission, she made the film only because she needed money.

Besides Crawford, the other toast of Hollywood on Academy Award night in 1945 was Ray Milland. Because of the bemused sense of self-loathing with which he infused his character, his performance in Billy Wilder’s “The Lost Weekend” is arguably the greatest rendering of an alcoholic on screen. The best actor winner knew his victory was special: On his way to a celebratory party after the awards, he had his chauffeur drive to a bridle path near Sunset that offered a glittering vista of Hollywood. Years before, when he had first come to Southern California, Milland was taken to this spot by a talent scout, who told him to gaze at the panorama and realize that “It all belongs to Ramon Novarro”--at the time, the biggest star in town. Standing there on Oscar night, Milland again surveyed the lights and said, “Mr. Novarro, tonight they belong to me.”

Because he was under contract to Paramount, a studio that at the time concentrated on romantic comedies and light dramas, the always charming Milland wasn’t given another opportunity to exercise his acting skills in quite the same way. But on that bridle path, could he possibly have contemplated that a quarter-century later he’d have part of the title role in “The Thing With Two Heads,” playing a bigot whose noggin gets transplanted onto the body of a black man--football’s Roosevelt Grier, no less?

Another contract player, Victor McLaglen, was a character actor who won an Oscar by lucking into a prestige picture (John Ford’s “The Informer”), but to his studio he remained just a commodity. Twentieth Century Fox continued to cast him in his traditional lovable roughneck roles, figuring this was what his (undiscriminating) fans wanted and, therefore, the way to make the most money off him, even if it meant an Oscar winner was appearing in such negligible programmers as “Professional Soldier” and “Sea Devils.”

Plus, the hulking McLaglen was not exactly typical leading man material; if he had had his choice of film roles, he probably still would have ended up in “Professional Soldier” and “Sea Devils.”

A similar dilemma faced Charles Laughton, who was wildly popular in the 1930s and who followed his Oscar-winning “The Private Life of Henry VIII” with such other hits as “Ruggles of Red Gap” and “Mutiny on the Bounty.” Laughton cut a homely, rather lumbering, figure, and when his novelty wore off, this eccentric actor found himself starring as the lead in “Captain Kidd” and, even more ignominiously, playing the same role in “Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd.” Fortunately, Laughton was also a man of the stage, so while the studios were offering him things like “The Strange Door,” he could find artistic fulfillment acting and directing in the theater. (He also directed the moodily brilliant 1955 film “The Night of the Hunter.”) In a happy turnabout, Laughton’s film acting career picked up again and he received an Oscar nomination for “Witness for the Prosecution” in 1957, closing out his career with strong performances in two major releases, Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus” and Otto Preminger’s “Advise and Consent.”

The cruelest fate of all is for an actor to spend years toiling in junk, then be given a respite through an Oscar-winning role, only to find himself back from whence he came. When Broderick Crawford received the award in 1949 for his impressive performance as a Huey Long-esque character in “All the King’s Men,” it looked as if a career that had consisted of movies with titles like “Tight Shoes” and “Butch Minds the Baby” was on a completely different course. That was only a temporary condition. Within a decade, this Oscar winner was cast as the villain in the cheap, Italian-made gladiator movie “Goliath and the Dragon.”

Unfortunately, these sob stories are not just tales from Hollywood’s past. Even today, Oscar winners are wandering the desert of bad movies, far removed from their glory days. Crawford once described Faye Dunaway as the only actress of her generation who “has the talent and the class and the courage it takes to make a real star.” Since her ferocious performance as Crawford in 1981’s “Mommie Dearest,” however, Dunaway’s career has been not unlike Crawford’s in her later days. In the late 1970s, Dunaway had both an Oscar and huge popular appeal. In the 1990s, her movies have included the schlock thriller “The Temp” and “Dunston Checks In,” a slapstick children’s film starring an orangutan. Despite such credits, Dunaway remains, in attitude and bearing, very much a “star.”

But, little known outside New York before he was cast as Salieri in “Amadeus,” 1984’s best actor F. Murray Abraham has seen his subsequent work render him almost as obscure as he was before his Oscar. Does anyone remember “Sweet Killing,” “By the Sword,” “Jamila” or “Russicum”? Has anyone ever even heard of them?

It’s not just actors, though. Certain Oscar-winning directors, too, have risen from the depths, and others have seen their ensuing careers plummet. Francis Ford Coppola and John G. Avildsen are a pair of Academy Award-winning directors who started out by making nudies. Jonathan Demme’s early works for Roger Corman, like “Caged Heat” and “Crazy Mama,” are buoyant and quite wonderful, but they certainly brought him little prestige, and years before he made “A Place in the Sun” and “Giant,” George Stevens’ oeuvre consisted of “The Nitwits” and “The Cohens and the Kellys in Trouble.”

These men stand in stark contrast to those filmmakers who experienced downward reversals of fortunes after their Oscar victories. Delbert Mann (“Marty”) went on to make the cheesy comedies “Quick, Before It Melts” and “Fitzwilly,” and onetime hot-young-thing William Friedkin (“The French Connection”) was later responsible for the infamously seamy “Jade” and “The Guardian,” a horror film about an ill-tempered tree. (Friedkin has at least been able to redeem himself somewhat with television work.) But no other filmmaker ended up further away from Academy Award-type material than 1930-31 winner Norman Taurog (“Skippy”), who received a second nomination for 1938’s “Boys Town.” Taurog capped off his career with the worst of Elvis (“Double Trouble,” “Speedway”) and two films starring Frankie Avalon. It is almost inconceivable that an Oscar-winning director could be responsible for “Sergeant Deadhead” and “Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine.” *